Migraine: Understanding A Common Disorder (expanded and updated)

In recent years the bestselling Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat have received great critical acclaim, but Oliver Sacks's readers may remember that he began his medical career working with migraine patients. In this new edition of Migraine, he returns to his first book and enriches it with additional case histories, new findings, and practical information.

For centuries physicians and migraineurs have been fascinated by the visual hallucinations, or auras, which often precede a migraine and which are similar to those induced by hallucinogenic drugs or deliria. In a remarkable new chapter, illustrated with startling full-color paintings by migraine sufferers, Dr. Sacks draws on recent advances in chaos theory and neural simulation to describe these "hallucinatory constants" and what they reveal about the working of the brain.

Another important addition to the 1992 edition discusses newly developed drug therapies for migraine, as well as alternative, nondrug approaches. Only Oliver Sacks's boundless curiosity and rich imagination could yield such a fresh, comprehensive view of one of humankind's oldest afflictions.

Oliver Sacks began his medical career in 1958 and his writing career in 1970 with the first edition of Migraine. Dr. Sacks is Professor of Neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.